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In a Suburban Gangland, Young Lives Cut Short

CIRCLE OF VIOLENCE Francisco Dueñas, once a member of a gang in Hempstead, has lost several friends and acquaintances to gang wars.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

UNIONDALE, N.Y.

THE phone rang at 4 p.m., just as Francisco Dueñas was leaving his house here on a tidy Long Island block with trimmed hedges. He had no time to talk. He was serving at a wedding reception that started in half an hour, and was already dressed in his tuxedo with the sleeves pulled down over his tattooed arms.

Francisco answered anyway. He recognized the number as belonging to El Niño, a 15-year-old nicknamed for his baby face whom Francisco had taken under his wing the year before, tutoring him in the rules of his gang, Salvadorans With Pride.

“They just stabbed Mikey on the handball court,” the boy said. He sounded panicked.

“Who did?” Francisco asked.

El Niño answered with a curse in Spanish: the slang they used to refer to their rival gang, Mara Salvatrucha.

Mikey — Michael Alguera — was also 15, the younger brother of a friend Francisco had known since middle school. Francisco, now 20, had played hundreds of handball games on the court between Hempstead High School and the Garden City golf course. He usually lost when he was matched up against Mikey, a handball whiz.

The kid was not in a gang, and he was too good-natured to have enemies. Even El Niño was just a wannabe, who aspired to join Francisco’s gang.

Francisco had been seeing the gang less lately, since his family moved to Uniondale from Hempstead. He had dropped out of school after the move — Mara Salvatrucha members controlled the schools in Uniondale. He sometimes wore a balaclava to cover his face when he left the house. Lately, however, Francisco was spending less time on the street, more time in the tuxedo. His girlfriend was pregnant, and he was worried about ending up in jail, or worse.

“Call the homies and go to the park,” Francisco told El Niño that afternoon, Jan. 18, 2008, trying to sound both comforting and authoritative. “I have to go to work.”

At the Sandcastle, a catering hall in Franklin Park where Francisco was serving at a wedding that night, he pushed aside thoughts of Mikey and focused on the promise of good tips. He never mentioned the gang in front of his work friends.

Francisco had become adept at controlling his feelings. Three other friends had been attacked in gang violence since he moved to Long Island from El Salvador in 2001; two had died. Francisco had scars to mark his own close calls: an inch-long swipe across his left eyebrow, a long seam across his right bicep, dents in his shins and over his left knee where he had been sprayed by a pellet gun, a gouge in his lower back dug by an enemy knife.

Mikey died in the hospital early the next morning. That night, Francisco served tables at another wedding. On Sunday, he worked a Sweet 16 party, where his main task was to make sure the white teenagers were not hiding bottles of liquor under the tables. On Monday, he bundled up in a sweatshirt and coat and walked the two miles to Hempstead to find out what had happened to his friend.

Twenty members of Salvadorans With Pride stood around sipping Coronas on the scarred brown grass of a park near the high school. Francisco grabbed a beer.

A few minutes later, as classes let out, 50 others arrived. El Niño was there, and filled Francisco in on details about the attack: There had been about a half-dozen men and they had asked the boys about their gang affiliation, then one had pulled a knife. The S.W.P. members were not certain of the identity of the men, but they had an idea.

S.W.P.’s leader, an old-timer in his late 20s, ordered them to stay vigilant. Mara Salvatrucha was encroaching on their territory, the school grounds. They ended the meeting with the gang’s prayer.

Photo

Michael Alguera's two brothers, Steve, far left, and Oscar Jr., and his mother, Clementina, are among his survivors.Credit
Phil Marino for The New York Times

“Sometimes I wonder how I will die, by the bullet wound or a knife in my side,” Francisco chanted along with the others. “Give my heart peace so I won’t have to fight. Heavenly father, please hear me tonight.”

The prayer soothed Francisco when he felt scared. He kept the text on a folded square of paper tucked in his wallet.

FRANCISCO arrived in Hempstead, a decaying inner-ring suburb in Nassau County, nine years after his mother. She had come ahead in the early 1990s, as the Salvadoran civil war was ending, leaving Francisco in the care of an aunt until she could save $5,000 to pay a smuggler to ferry him across the border to join her. Francisco was 12 when he crossed from Tijuana to San Diego in 2001, stuffed in the trunk of a Honda next to several strangers. The trip was terrifying, but later he would say it had toughened him for life on Long Island.

Many of the new classmates he met that year at Alverta B. Gray Schultz Middle School came the same way. They left behind grandmothers and aunts who served as surrogate parents and reunited with mothers and fathers they remembered only from photographs. Their parents believed that the American suburbs offered a better chance at education and jobs than the violent countries they had left behind. In 2002, the Immigration and Naturalization Service picked up more than 5,000 unaccompanied children trying to enter the United States illegally, more than 80 percent of them from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador; in later years, the number increased to 7,000.

On the first day of school, Francisco sat next to Jaime Alvarenga, who had made the crossing in 2001 through the Arizona desert. By the end of the day, the two boys were best friends. They played soccer after school, passed notes in class and kept watch for the bullies who picked on the newcomers. But they lived on opposite sides of town and that summer, drifted apart. Jaime lived in Mara Salvatrucha territory. Francisco’s apartment building was controlled by S.W.P.

The two rival gangs had appeared on Long Island around the same time in the mid-1990s, after the last of the white residents who built Hempstead into a bustling retail hub half a century earlier moved away and Hispanics filled the void. Mara Salvatrucha was formed by a group of older men, some of them veterans of the Salvadoran civil war, who were often victims of the village’s African-American gangs. They adopted the name from a gang gaining a reputation for ruthlessness in Los Angeles and Central America.

Salvadorans With Pride started as a civic organization, also with the intention of protecting members of Hempstead’s growing Hispanic population. The good intentions disintegrated when some of its members — most of them American-born — clashed with Mara Salvatrucha.

Nationally, Mara Salvatrucha was drawing the attention of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., which compared the gang to the Mafia and created a special task force to track it. In Hempstead, the police cracked down and alternated between arresting leaders of each group. The gangs always seemed to grow back: The Hempstead police estimate there are some 1,000 gang members, most of them black or Hispanic, in and around their village of 52,000; the Nassau police count 3,000 in the county.

Francisco had never encountered gangs in El Salvador, but he joined Salvadorans With Pride the summer after his first year on Long Island. His new friends promised to end the teasing and bullying, and, like other teenagers, he wanted to fit in. Back at school in the fall, he learned that Jaime had joined Mara Salvatrucha.

The two tried to stay friends. They still passed notes in class. But Jaime was having trouble at home and disappeared from school for days at a time. Francisco had his own problems. He was fighting constantly with his mother, who felt like a stranger after their years apart. When Jaime disappeared for two weeks in December, Francisco worried, but did not go looking for him.

On Jan. 17, 2003, Francisco woke up to a phone call. Jaime, 14, had been stabbed three times by members of 18th Street, a gang affiliated with S.W.P. that had originated in Los Angeles. Jaime had died alone on the steps of the Long Island Rail Road station. Francisco was devastated, but he was too afraid to go to Jaime’s funeral. Instead, he watched the local news for a glimpse of the coffin.

The next year, Francisco enrolled at Hempstead High, a struggling 1,700-student school. Its graduation rate hovered around 40 percent, and in a village that was more than 80 percent minority, it had a student population that was 99 percent black or Hispanic. He was involved in fights every other day as gangs vied for control over the school.

In November of 2004, Francisco ended up in a group fight with one of his old soccer buddies, Olman Herrera, who was associated with Mara Salvatrucha. As the high school security guards broke up the fight, Olman escaped. Moments later he was found across the street, stabbed to death. The police later charged two older teenagers linked to Salvadorans With Pride in the attack.

Francisco nearly lost another friend in the summer of 2007. On a scorching day in August, he had taken the day off from the catering hall to join friends at the beach. Afterward, they had gone to one of their favorite haunts, Taco Bell, in a dilapidated strip a block from Hempstead High.

It was S.W.P. territory, but Mara Salvatrucha often lurked around the auto body shops across the street. The group lingered over tacos. When it was time to go home, Francisco walked ahead with his arm draped across his girlfriend’s shoulders.

Photo

Michael Alguera, 15, left, known as Mikey, was fatally stabbed on a handball court at Hempstead High School,in January 2008.Credit
Phil Marino for The New York Times

A movement across the street caught Francisco’s eye. He looked back to see a mass of people crossing toward them — Mara Salvatrucha. At least a dozen. Francisco ran, pushing his girlfriend ahead and scrambling to pull open the zipper of his backpack. He felt for the cold metal of his gun and turned around.

He was too late. One of his friends — who was not a member of either gang — lay crumpled on the ground, blood dribbling out of his neck and back. The men who had stabbed him were already running away. Francisco hailed a cab and tried to stop the bleeding as they sped across the highway overpass to Mercy Hospital.

That night Francisco kept a panicked vigil in the waiting room, leaving only after the doctors said his friend would survive. His voice shook when he recounted the story, but he insisted that, like the border crossing, the experience made him stronger.

ON Jan. 18, 2008, not long before El Niño called Francisco, the phone rang in the Hempstead home of Oscar and Clementina Alguera. It was their middle son, Oscar Jr. Their youngest, Mikey, had been stabbed on the handball court. They needed to hurry.

The couple had met in the 1980s, after Oscar made his way across the border from Costa Rica and Clementina came from Colombia. Work was plentiful on Long Island, and Hispanic immigrants were flocking to join the boom. The couple rented an apartment in a cul-de-sac next to an elementary school, and Clementina quit her job as a manicurist to raise their three boys.

The Algueras were strict — no television until homework was done and no friends the parents did not approve first. Mr. Alguera insisted that his sons graduate from high school so they could find better jobs than his, in construction. School was sacrosanct. When the boys called to say they were staying late that Friday afternoon, Mrs. Alguera said yes without a second thought.

After the phone call, Mr. Alguera dropped the tools he had been packing into the shed after a long day’s work. He drove as his wife frantically dialed the phone. But at the school, police officers held them back. They should not see their son this way.

The principal, Reginald Stroughn, had pushed his way through the underbrush behind the school to the handball court within minutes of the stabbing, the police shortly after him. The boys who had been playing with Mikey said a group of men had jumped the fence around the court and demanded to know which gang the boys belonged to. Mikey answered: none. The boys gave up their cellphones and an MP3 player without a fight, but as the men left, one pulled out a knife and jabbed Mikey in the side.

His brother Oscar held him until the paramedics arrived. Mikey died 12 hours later.

It was the first murder on school grounds in Hempstead, and Mr. Stroughn was stunned. After watching the ambulance drive away, he sat in his office in silence for a half-hour, wondering what he could have done differently.

Hempstead’s schools had once been the pride of Long Island, but they had deteriorated quickly as the village became racially and economically segregated. Besides its lagging test scores, state audits had cited the school district for financial mismanagement and violence.

But Mr. Stroughn, who arrived in the fall of 2003, had transformed the place. He reined in the fights, made an effort to get to know the Hispanic students and divided the school into more intimate academies. The graduation rate rose nearly 20 percentage points by August 2007 — though, at 64 percent, it still lagged far behind the 99 percent at the nearly all-white Garden City High School, three miles away. Mr. Stroughn had learned shortly before Mikey’s death that he was to be named the 2008 principal of the year by the School Administrators Association of New York.

But in the year that followed, the graduation rate dipped again. School administrators were too busy comforting grieving students and frightened parents to push Regents exams and college. Principal Stroughn is retiring this summer.

A year and a half after the murder, the Alguera family is broken. A bottle of maple syrup sits on a shelf in the kitchen, unopened: Mikey was the one who made pancakes every Saturday, and no one had the heart to take over his job.

Oscar Jr. dropped out of high school. He said every wall there reminded him of surreptitious games of handball he had played with his little brother when the teachers weren’t looking. Oscar Sr. was angry — at the school, at the gang, at the paramedics who had been unable to save his son. He began drinking. Clementina asked him to leave the house, and he moved out. She found a job as a crossing guard, shepherding middle school students to and from school.

The police investigation into Mikey’s murder yielded no arrests. Mara Salvatrucha’s influence in Hempstead began to wane, but it was replaced by new gangs that were less well known, but just as violent. Three more of Francisco’s acquaintances were killed in the months after Mikey’s death.

Francisco found a second job at a grocery store to support his baby. He told his gang he was “dropping the flag” — laying down his bandana and leaving the streets. Still, he felt compelled to go to the meetings at the park after each of the murders. He also still kept a pellet gun under the mattress in the room he shared with his girlfriend and his infant son, and the worn slip of paper with the gang’s prayer folded in his wallet.

Sarah Garland spent five years following gang members on Long Island for her forthcoming book, “Gangs in Garden City” (Nation). This article is an adaptation based on interviews with people involved.